Devil Take the Hindmost
by our halcyon days
Summary: The music takes you back to a different time. — Raoul, Gustave, Erik.


Because I just cannot accept that Raoul would allow Erik to vanish with Gustave, or that Gustave would _let_ Erik take him from Raoul. Mostly this is silly, but I wanted to write about it nonetheless.

**Devil Take the Hindmost**

_Masquerade, paper faces on parade; masquerade. Hide your face so the world will never find you. _The tune hangs in the air of this place like the freeze in the north, ever-present and long since unquestioned as a simple fact of nature; not unwelcome, but not quite invited, either. It is the only music that remains in the home of the elderly Vicomte de Changy—your home, large and grand and overwhelmingly vacant in spite of its finery; the music of the place, of your life and family, has dimmed into a background thrum, leaving nothing but the lilting tune which you find yourself humming to yourself with troubling frequency as of late. The music box has not been played in weeks now and still the song swims in your head, the most pungent reminder you can give yourself of better times, and worse times; you live alone now with the rusting brass toy, but the memories are still alive, and they twist through your mind with the music.

Christine comes with the small things now, in the belongings that she left behind; her dresses remain in the old wooden wardrobe, her vanity largely untouched, and you would be inclined to mourn over them if the energy for mourning remained. Somehow, in spite of everything, the spirit of her is the weakest; the years spent in quiet devastation have long since taken their toll, and yet you feel no right to them. Her choices and yours ultimately mattered little in the face of his presence, you find; he dwarfs you so completely in every aspect that you had, for the life of you, not felt entitled to grieve over the death of your own wife. The music takes a sharp dip and you recall standing rigid, pale-faced behind your son—_your son_—in the Paris graveyard as they lower her coffin into the snow-covered earth, and you recall the damnable feeling of his presence there, watching where you cannot see. Gustave sees him, of course he sees him, and you know his eyes wander in search of the hiding place you could easily direct him to, should you wish. You do not, did not, would not—but the burial ends, the few straggling spectators disappear, and he is there, a phantom figure in black against the stark white of the graveyard.

The only thing that comes with more effort than fighting back the infuriated tirade of your thoughts is voicing them in the first place, and any chance you have of doing so is lost as Gustave hurtles towards him through the snow. You reach for his shoulder instinctively, but he has already fallen into his black capes, engulfed; you bite down on your tongue, hard enough to draw blood, and stand trembling, alone in the snow, more from fear that he will whirl away into thin air and vanish with the both of them than coldness or even anger. Familiar jealousy twists violently in the pit of your stomach as you watch them, as rigid as the statues surrounding the lot; time drags by in leaps and pauses, and finally Gustave lifts his tear-stained face to look at his father. Quietly, you hear him ask the masked man not to leave again. He obliges, and when he voices his agreement, his eyes are not on Gustave, but you, burning holes into you, daring you to protest. Your hands clench into fists at your sides, but you remain silent.

His presence in your home is no less welcome than it would have been all those years ago when he still lurked beneath the Opera Populaire, but you take what little solace you may in the fact that he does not stay, merely comes and goes as he pleases. He is there only when Gustave wishes him to be, and while this is still much more frequently than you care for, it is preferable to having the lunatic lurking about your attic. He too frequently slips into your bedroom when he thinks you will not notice and sits among the forgotten possessions that still linger with the scent of her, ghosts himself through her closet and vanity; things go missing every so often, small things, but you notice them and say nothing. What right have you? She had chosen him, he had won; you simply remain out of the refusal to see the only love left in your life whisked away by the menace of his own blood.

And as he grows older, the similarities between them become increasingly prevalent. Gustave has always been musically-oriented, as talented as he is fascinated by complex melodies and simple harmonies alike; his childish banging away at the piano was always oddly deliberate, and with the Phantom hanging over his shoulder in your parlor, you find your own home becoming a hellhole of music. Not Christine's music, not the music you fell in love with, came to adore, but _his_music, dark and entrancing and dangerous. They wake you up more times than you care to count in the ungodly hours of the morning, taunting you out of bed with the strangest music; oftentimes you find the songs throwing you into flashbacks of a chandelier crashing down in a blaze of hateful fire, of a string of rope around your neck as you watch your betrothed embrace the madman who put it there, to seeing her in his arms again years later—only then she is dead and you never really stop blaming him in the dreams, even when you do in reality.

You do stop blaming him, somewhere along the twisted, looping line of your life in which he is a recurring extra. In retrospect, you suspect it begins the first time he boasts about your shared son's first opera, completed at the age of thirteen; the Phantom seldom speaks to you unless necessary, or addressed by you first, but when the full score is finally completed and perfect in all its morbidity, he cannot help but flaunt it. This is the first time it occurs to you that he is just as much a father as you are, just as feeling and proud as any other; mad, yes, deranged, of course, but no less haughty in the face of his child's accomplishments than you, or any other father. He strikes you as human for the first time, and the realization so utterly shakes the foundation of all you have convinced yourself of for nearly fourteen years that you spend the next few days in a complete daze.

You never ask to hear the final composition, but one day weeks later, Gustave asks if you would like to hear a piece; you agree, thinking it perhaps against your better judgement. The Phantom stands lingering in the doorway, terribly out of place in your parlor, watching intently as the boy begins to tap away at the ivory keys. The music begins slowly, a gentle, light-hearted melody that immediately brings Christine to your memory; Little Lotte, as her scarf billows in the wind and you find yourself chasing it down the beach, splashing carelessly into the freezing water to retrieve the simple scrap of clothing. It lifts slightly, the tempo rises, and it is Christine years later in her rise to fame, the evening you finally see her again at the opera; a deeper key is introduced, a steady undertone to the shifting, jumpy harmony, and it is you in her dressing room, leaving behind her red roses and love notes. The two parallel melodies merge finally in the crescendo, low and high, steady and uncertain, and it is the night on the rooftop, the night of your engagement. You fail to realize that you've begun to cry until the melodies separate again suddenly; the dreamy drifts away, giving way fully to the underlying concrete—but it does not last, a few keys and it falters, becomes harsh and demanding one moment, then melancholy and loathing the next. You recognize it as you, and wipe your eyes hurriedly though Gustave is so entranced that he seems not to notice anything around him. But the masked figure leaning in the doorway sees, watches you with an awful intensity, and you feel on the verge of illness before the song ends on a sudden tragic note, soft and bittersweet. Gustave sits in silence for a moment, gaze dreamy, before he seems to return to reality; turning first to look at the Phantom, who gives him nothing more than an approving nod, he rushes off of the seat and to you. He embraces you, and you cannot keep from crying.

When you look up again, finally with dry eyes, the Phantom is gone. Gustave smiles and takes your hand, asks if you liked it. You nod meekly, and his smile brightens. "It was Erik's idea," he informs you, and it takes a minute or two for the name to connect with its owner. _He has a name, he has a name_—the idea sets itself in a rewind, repeat cycle in your mind, and in a bizarre daze you do not respond to your son, but contemplate the name, and the implications that come with it. He is a man after all. You have had no reason not to believe it until now, have even boasted about it in the past (_"I've beaten him before, Miss Giry; he isn't Mephistopheles, Miss Giry"_), but that there is something to call him, something to define him in your mind besides "the Phantom" or "that menace" shakes what little is left of your idea of him, and all you are left with is the question of whether she knew.

He comes more often after that incident, but you never call him by name, just as he never calls you by yours. You are the Phantom (alternatively, 'him', 'you', 'monster') and the Vicomte ('monsieur', 'miserable fop'), respectively, and this barrier is never verbally breached, even when your thoughts finally place the name to the face, and you speak his name in private to Gustave, who uses it as easily in reference to him as he does 'Papa' to you. It makes him human, and one day as you brush by one another in a hallway, coming and going from speaking with your shared son, you realize that you've no energy left to hate him. The bitterness and resentment remain in small amounts, each time a new item of Christine's goes missing, but the enigma that is him becomes a fascinating one, and you begin to understand. Slowly, in small increments of Gustave's adoration and his own dry sense of humor, the brief glimpses of his wit and genius, you understand; when he teaches Gustave about science and architecture, things unimaginably far beyond your grasp, you understand. And you no longer blame him. Not really.

But you know that he blames you, and that he will never stop. As accustomed as he seems to have become with your presence, you know that he still hates you in his core because he has no reason to extend to you anything else—and can you blame him for this much? No, you cannot, and so it does not surprise you that when Gustave is grown and leaves home, the day he departs is the last day Erik's presence lingers in your household. Your son, a man now in his own right, leans down to hug you from his towering new height before turning to face the figure standing a short ways behind you, just out of the open doorway's view. They are nearly identical now, even you cannot deny it; Gustave has his inhuman tallness, the thin, lanky build and a dark allure to him—but he has Christine's eyes, and Christine's smile, and he is everything beautiful a monster plagued by genius has ever created in this world. And when Erik whisks out of your front door, head tilted beneath a fedora, capes whirling around him, you know that he is not coming back. But you know that wherever Gustave goes, no matter how far from home he strays, he will never be alone.

_Hide your face so the world will never find you_—The music stops, the brass monkey has stopped clicking together its cymbals, and you take a few moments to recall that you are old now, alone while your son traverses America with Erik nearby in his shadow; you are the only resident of the de Changy household, you and the toy which defines a man who has left a permanent mark upon your life, and the lives of those nearest you. You run your fingers along the metal fur, ghosting your touch over every minute detail, exactly as Christine had once explained, and smile. It turns out that it is you who comes in last after all, old and alone with no one left to spare you a thought until you find your way to your deathbed—and what then?

You have no way of knowing now, of course, that when you are finally set into the snow-covered ground beside your late beloved, each year on the anniversary of your births and deaths, two lone red roses appear on each of your graves without fail.


End file.
